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Friday, July 4, 2014

The Wheat-Free Princess e-book

The author, Marcie, has 3 kids with celiac disease and one of my daughters has a gluten allergy. We looked around the internet for children's books that could help our kids understand wheat and gluten allergies, but there wasn't much to chose from. We saw a need for something and now we've filled it! This book is fairly basic and aimed at the 3 to 6 year old audience. This 12 page book helps kids affected as well as their friends. Basically, someone suffering from a gluten allergy can't eat foods with wheat or even foods that have accidentally touched something made of wheat. These kids can't share food with friends and they must wash their hands before eating anything (to ensure no particles of gluten make it into their mouths). Please help us spread the word about this book so we can raise enough funds to publish a printed version! Thanks so much!

About the art and process: I've spent well over 80 hours on the art of this book and lots more time going through the copyright and publishing processes. Here are a few pieces of concept art:

I sketched a few things on paper, but most in Photoshop. I did all the final work as vector art in Illustrator. After creating the colored vector art, I exported it out of Illustrator, tweaked the colors and gradients in Photoshop, and then re-sampled those new colors in Illustrator

I also did some value studies to help with lighting and mood.

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Honestly, I really liked the direction of the Photoshop weeping willow value painting, but it didn't fit in with the blocky color shapes in the other parts of the book. In the end, I chose a more simplified style to match the rest of the book. You'll just have to buy it to see that part... and shed a tear with me over the amount of simplification I had to do on the tree. In the end I was decently pleased with the final page as it still took it's cues from the atmosphere established in these sketches. Like my wife says, "No one will know the difference, just stick a fork in it!" It's nice to be done with this project after 2 years of working off and on with it. In June, I was blessed with a month of no homework from my online class. That was just enough time for me to finish off the book and get it e-published. I hope you'll buy it, like it and share it. We've got a Facebook page and a Google+ page. You can buy the e-book on Amazon (for pretty much any tablet or mobile device, including smart phones). We are eagerly awaiting the book getting published in print form when we raise enough money. We may get a kickstarter going sometime soon. Thanks for being there! It's a lot more fun to type all this stuff and share the journey when I know someone's going to read it!